Experimenting with Distributed Generation of RSA Keys

Thierry Congos (1) , François Lesueur (1)

1 SUPELEC-Campus Rennes

Threshold cryptography allows a message to be enciphered through the cooperation of several entities among which no one knows the whole secret key. However, if the key pair is generated using an usual centralized algorithm, then there is an entity which knows the whole secret key. In this paper, we present an implementation of a distributed algorithm to generate RSA keys, previously proposed by Boneh and Franklin. Using this implementation, we analyze how many parties can jointly generate the key and we show that a few dozens of ordinary nodes distributed worldwide can achieve this task.

Keywords: RSA; Threshold Cryptography; Distributed Key Generation

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]

Thierry Congos, François Lesueur. Experimenting with Distributed Generation of RSA Keys. 5th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management (STM), Sep 2009, Saint-Malo, France. ⟨hal-00423326⟩